The Moz Blog

Article Marketing: Mostly A Scam - Whiteboard Friday

Article marketing is mostly a scam. Well, wait... some types of article marketing are really scammy. Guest blogging, legitimate article sharing, and similar tactics are great and sustainable linkbuilding practices, but making up terrible article content and passing it off as something people should read or link to is both bad for users and bad for long-term SEO. This week, Rand discusses some of the reasons article marketing is so nefarious and some alternatives that are more user-friendly. Have any alternatives or tactics you're fond of? Let us know in the comments below!

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about one of the scummiest, lowdownest, dirtiest, ugliest, messiest, nastiest, no goodnesst things of all in the SEO world, it is called article marketing.

Now, there are some good, authentic, legitimate forms of article marketing. They're usually called guest blogging or guest authorship, guest writing. What article marketing has come to mean in the field that we are in is something just sickeningly awful. So what I want to do today is talk about it a little bit. You can probably feel some of my pain. Then, we can get into it in the comments and talk more. I know one of the issues, too, is that some folks have success with this, especially early on in their careers, and then think, oh, this is how I can do SEO. I can just do article marketing.

Let me first, for those of you who aren't familiar, walk you through how article marketing or article spinning, article republishing is done. Basically, we have our friend here. I don't know, let's call him Fred. Fred is clacking away on his keyboard. He's like, "Oh, you know what? I am going to make a useless, fairly painful to read, crap article about why cats are the best pets, and in that article I am going to link back to pages on my site that are about cat ownership or cat food or whatever it is that I am trying to rank for. Those links are going to pass me some nice juice. They'll go over to my website. That'll be real nice there." But instead of just publishing on my site, I might publish it on my site, but I am also going to either take it with me and submit it to a bunch of article directories, article portals, article resource sites, sometimes they're called article publishers. They have all sorts of different names - article portals or something like that sometimes.

Or even better, I'm going to use the article spinning robot software that I downloaded which will go and submit it to all these different article sites for me. By the way, one of the great features of it is it bypasses the CAPTCHA by reading it or they have special arrangements and it only cost me $299. How can I go wrong? My god! It sounds like an amazing deal. Who wouldn't want to spin their article with Article Spinning Robot 5000 for $300? What a . . . sure, that's totally going to work.

So, once you get your article published up on all these different sites, the goal is, the idea is that hopefully when I search Google for why cats are the best pets, I see hundreds of different results. Oh, look at all these article sites that I submitted to, they're all getting indexed, and that must mean they're passing link juice back to me, and hey some of these article sites have a nice home page PageRank, maybe a 4 or a 5 or even 3. Super exciting. Clearly going to be incredibly valuable and useful for my SEO practices. So the goal is I am going to get these hundreds of sites that are all linking back to me with the anchor text that I have optimized from my article and that's going to help me rank.

You know what the problem is? The thing that sucks about this is that sometimes it works. In fact, sometimes it works for months at a time or even a year or two at a time.

I was just in New York. I was speaking at an affiliate conference event, and there were some people in the room. One of the people there asked me, she said, "You know, Rand, I do a lot of article marketing, and I am wondering, instead of writing unique content pieces, entirely unique, I heard that Google only duplicate content checks the first and the last paragraph. So can I just leave the middle paragraphs the same and produce hundreds of different articles, send them out to all the different sites? Because usually the editors, they don't even have editors or they are crappy. They don't review anything. So, if the first paragraph is unique, they usually accept the article and I can get them reposted. Do you think that will work well?"

I don't even know how to tell you what's wrong with your frame of mind when you ask these questions. It's incredibly frustrating. I tried to be very empathetic and explain, hey, search engines use these Markov chain analyses, they can detect duplicate content, very similar content pretty easily, and these sites tend to be very low quality anyway. She's sort of like, "Well, okay. I hear you, but I did get my rankings up quite a bit when I used the article spinner." It's sort of like, yeah, the problem with all of this stuff, with low quality tactics like this is that sometimes they work in the short term and you have to decide whether it is worth the risks.

Let's talk about a few of those. First off, does Google really want to count those links? Is that what search engineers feel like are going to provide the best results? When I search for something in Google and they say, "Ah, well, you know what, looks like Rand's article on white cats are the best pets, that's been spun on 300 article sites, so he must be the very best resource in the whole world on that topic." Can you possibly imagine a Googler thinking that way? So, instead they're going to be writing algorithms to try and prevent this stuff from working. They do all the time. Some of them fall out of favor. You can see they'll sometimes publicly lose their PageRank, or they won't but they'll lose their ability to pass link juice, or the sites will be completely penalized and they won't rank anywhere in the top 5 or 10 results and your site won't rank anywhere. One day Google just wakes up, does an algorithm change. You wake up in the morning, and boom, all your rankings are gone. You're way down in the penalty box. You go, "What did I do wrong? I've been a good article spinner. How could they do this to me?"

Another big risk is the duplicate content side. If you've submitting any content that you'd actually like to rank for, it's going to be pretty tough because some of these article sites are going to claim it's their own. They're going to earn links to their site more than you're able to earn links to your site. You might be penalized and they stay unpenalized, meaning that they're going to essentially cannibalize the traffic that you could have earned. If you are writing anything really good, you should be wanting to put it on one of two sites - your own 90% of the time, or maybe 10% of the time on a guest posting on another blog, on another website, on a content site, that has great reach, great reputation, that's going to earn you some trust and authority, not just from the links you're going to get. That's not the goal. The goal is to get readership and trust over to your site from real people who enjoy that content.

Of course, the content itself. Most of the time when people are talking about doing article marketing or article spinning, they're talking about the worst quality, lowest junk crap. As you can see with updates like Panda and Big Daddy and Vince a little bit, Google is just getting so much smarter about content analysis, and they're able to determine what matters in a block of text and what actual people like. They use user and usage data to do this now. Trying to game that system with low quality junk is not going to get you very far.

Finally, the thing that I think people forget about the most is they'll spend weeks or months, hours and hours on end, trying to spin the right things and find the right directories and getting their articles submitted here and generating some junky crap over there. I think to myself, imagine, imagine if you were doing something authentic. Imagine if you were doing real high quality SEO and inbound marketing. Imagine if instead of doing that, you got 50 more Twitter followers that day and you shared a bunch of good stuff and you wrote one guest post that maybe only went to one site, but that link lasted for the next 10 years. Imagine what you've lost when you spend time doing this kind of crap.

So, are there some alternatives? I was talking to some people at the affiliate show about the alternatives they are using. They're like, "Yeah, you know, when article marketing stopped working for me, I went with some directory link submission stuff. Then I tried some do follow commenting, and that seemed to work all right." They are sort of like, "Oh, you know, maybe some nofollow comments. That could work as well. It seems like sometimes nofollow comments do work. I'll do some reciprocal link exchanges." No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Just no. Okay.

How about you try something, anything real? Real and useful. If you think that you can manipulate the search engines or that search engine optimization, that the practice of improving your rankings and gaining traffic is going to be done through this kind of stuff, you're living a decade ago man. This is not going to work. One of the worst parts about this is that when you do this, the impression you create on users, on visitors who do find you, even if you manage to win . . . let's imagine that you got your content up to number one using article spinning and article robots and article marketing. Good for you. Imagine what's going to happen when I come to your site, I visit, and I am, like, "God, this is totally junky." Then I see a bunch of nofollow comment spam that you've left on the Web, and I see the articles of low quality that you've submitted everywhere. What am I going to think about your brand? How is your conversion rate possibly going to match up to the high rankings that you've achieved? If it doesn't, why are you even bothering? Isn't it so much easier to get 100 visitors and convert 10 of them than to get 10,000 visitors and convert 1 out of 1,000? It always is.

So, I really want to suggest it's not that article marketing is evil. This isn't a moral thing. This is about wasting your time and energy as a marketer and doing things that just detract from our profession.

I hope that you will avoid the classic forms of article marketing and consider some real authentic alternatives. I certainly hope that you'll join me again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

About Aaron Wheeler —
Aaron is the manager of the Help Team at SEOmoz. He's usually thinking about how to scale customer service in a way that keeps customers delighted. You'll also find him reading sci-fi, watching HBO, cooking up vegetarian eats, and drinking down whiskey treats!

241 Comments

There is apparently a lot of emotions and oppinions in play, when we discuss the ethical aspect of SEO.

We live in 2011, and therefore we have to look at how the search engines behave and react right now. Article marketing, do-follow commenting and directory submission work - wether we like it or not. It may not always do, but it does right now. You can close your eyes and wait until Google makes a change that stops this, but your "opponents" may outrank you untill then. And what if this change is happening 2 years from now?

Remember though, these techniques are just one side of SEO, and you should always do a risk assesment when you consider using them (this applies to everything related to SEO though).

To be honest I don't like the preaching style of this video. I like SEOmoz for the insigths in how SEO works, and I feel like this video is too biased.

I understand SEOmoz has a brand to protect, but I hope this doesnt mean you shouldn't expect completely unbiased knowledge from SEOmoz in the future.

If you're a super-savvy black hat / gray hat SEO and you know exactly how to play this game, AND you have the risk tolerance to support it (and sites/income that can back you up if one or several sites fall to penalties), then you can mostly ignore this advice. Those folks know what they're doing, they know it doesn't add value to the web and that it's a short-term tactic. Nothing I say will change their minds.

But, for those new to SEO or even intermediate at the practice hearing about the benefits of article marketing (if you search for that phrase in Google, it all sounds pretty good), the truth about the risks need to be out there. I'm not trying to be preachy or suggest that it's immoral or unethical - I'm saying it's risky, it's a poor use of most marketers' time and it's not a tactic that brings any branding, conversion or community building value (quite the opposite). If you're not trying or don't need to build a brand because you're doing SEO for churn+burn sites, then yeah, this WB Friday's not for you.

But, at the least, I think you'd agree it's good for me to put my perspective out there and at least challenge marketers to question their assumptions and tactics. Thinking critically never hurts, right? :-)

Yes I agree, and thats also the cool thing about SEOmoz, that you and the rest of the SEOmoz team have an oppinion and participate in the following discussion to each post.

After reading the transcription or seing the video I think people are led to believe that the three aforementioned techniques should never be used. I'm just saying they can work, especially if used in combination with the more "high quality" techniques.

But as we both mention, this is not for everyone because you need to know what you are doing and the risk associated with it.

Have you really seen an example of Google laying out a penalty for something like this? Seems kind of unlikely as this stuff is even easier/cheaper to do to your competition than buying obviously paid links. Not a very good precedent to set.

Google will NEVER penalize a website that does "article marketing". Why? Because they have no way of knowing if the website owner or someone affiliated with the website created that article/link. Same goes for link buying. They'll devalue it, but they're not going to penalize it. The problem here is that Google has no idea if it's the owner creating those links, or someone trying to get their competitor penalized.

I don't think any decent SEO could honestly stand up for the quality of article spinning/marketing etc.... However thats not really the point.

A client goes to an SEO company for rankings and more organic traffic, they usually have PR teams and brand management working hard to make sure their brand is seen in the right light and adds value. If you're an SEO company and you turn to the client and say "Hey, you guys don't rank anywhere and your traffic year on year is pretty flat, but hey we got some great content published on these top quality sites" Do you really think the client is going to care?

Of course rankings and traffic aren't the only things SEO's should be focussed on but it is often how the client measures your performance, if not always.

So, the 'article marketing' scams. hmm... I guess if it's a scam it has to deliver something well below your expectations. I may be wrong but from what I have seen of these types of 'article spinners' are:

A) They are super cheap

B) Easy to use

C) They work

When I say they work I mean, most of the time. Sure you can't article market your way to top rankings alone but from the evidence I have seen they help give you a massive push and have you ever seen a penalty handed out for this type of activity? I'd seriously be interested to know if you have.

So their cheap, easy to use and they work. Yes terrible way to garner links, the sites are also just as terrible but is that the point?

Very often we get the opportunity to publish on some great resources, however the post on that resource gets scraped hundreds of times, you still end up with hundreds of crap links. You send out a press release through one of the popular wires, again your content is placed on crap sites, are these also scams? Their usually more expensive :)

I think ultimately if you're trying to produce quality, unique content it doesn't really matter where it gets published, sure stronger sites will deliver better results but ultimately the content is heading for the crap sites eventually anyway.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not an article marketing junkie :) and I wish it didn't work as well as it does, the point is it works and the risks of using it (in my opinion) are very low and the cost of engaging in it is nothing, again (in my opinion).

The "why not?" here is the sustainability of the tactic. You're clearly an intelligent individual, so I don't think you're naive enough to think that these links will hold their value forever. Google is getting smarter, and paying more and more attention to quality - Panda proved that. Your clients may be happy now, but when the Koala update (okay, I made that up) comes out and all of your clients' links are de-valued and their rankings plummet, you're going to have some 'splaining to do, Lucy.

A better tactic is to educate your clients, manage their expectations, and use high quality linkbuilding tactics.

As I said in the comment I'm not an article marketing junkie, however if I was running a press spin for a client and wanted to get the word out I would think nothing of pushing that content out via as many channels I could lay my hands on, inlcuding article submission sites.

Of course Google will eventually catchup with these links and ye they will no doubt be devalued, if article marketing is your sole technique you're going to be in trouble. SEO campaigns should be as diverse as possible incorporating as many different link opportunities as possible.

I agree high quality link building is a must for any campaign, however on its own you're always going to finish last and it's been that way as long as I have been in the industry. Because tactics like article marketing are so 'painless' in that they don't take any real time or effort you can add them into your 'quality' strategy without wasting any time.

Company B - Does all of the above and adds, article marketing and online press releases to supplement the main strategy.

Seriously, in my opinion Company B are going to win in the short and long term. Article marketing has been around forever, yes links get devalued but I have never seen a penalty handed out for it and I can't see a scenario where they might.

If the right person is handling the SEO, Company A will win every single time. While you're spending time creating low quality content, putting in the spin syntax, and blasting it out to hundreds of websites, I'm doing hours of research for my next piece of HOMERUN linkbait. In the end, we both end up with hundreds of links, but mine are from relevant, authoritative websites.

I see your point, but that's just my opinion. Article directory links are too low quality for me to even waste my time on them. And in the end, they're going to get devalued. Why put your effort into something that's just going to disappear? Spend 100% of your time on quality tactics, and reap the rewards.

Pushing content out via article directories is not taxing at all, what 30 mins to write a few spins of a recent press release you sent out. That's it.

You do this along side your 'quality' link building.

'Homerun' linkbait is hit and miss, some win some lose, I have worked and met with some of the best minds in the industry and even they cannot recreate the magic formula everytime. A great piece of linkbait can take days to prepare and create and could flop. Hours for nothing.

What I am saying is that alongside all the quality stuff you do, article marketing can and does play a role. If they get devalued in a years time you have all the quality stuff you have done propping you up.

Article marketing is a bolt on, not a strategy, but when used with all the nicey nicey techniques we all love, it can and does give an edge to those dominating Google.

I see where you're coming from, Risk vs Reward. Sure. However, I also think that you may be thinking a little 2D in a 3d situation.

That time would "go backwards" and pay for itself many times over again...IMO Remember, "Quality is free".

Those 30 minutes (agreed, that's not a long time spent to yield results of decent potential), are multiplied every single time a person sees www.crappyarticlesite.com/yourspuncontent and decides to hit the back button.

"imagine if you were doing something authentic"

That time would "go backwards" and pay for itself many times over again...IMO Remember, "Quality is free".

And guess how many pages are duplicates of the article according to Google? 1160!! THIS IS INSANE! Here's the search query as proof: http://bit.ly/q14IUN. Thank god the seomoz.org copy is first!

In each copy of my article, there are a few links pointing to my site and all those backlinks have done absolutely nothing to increase traffic or serps on my site. Hopefully Google hasn't penalized my site because of all those spammy links! Not sure.

Rand I hate it when you do posts like this, how about you stop telling us what link building techniques you don't believe work and start telling us what works????
The fact of the matter is that article marketing still works as part of a broader link profile and why shouldnt it? A fantastic piece of content out there on the web with a link back to your site!
The nature of this post has the ability to tarnish alot of reputable companies who build article links as part of a very diverse link structure, scammy and low life was it? All I hear from this blog nowadays is the voice of Matt Cutts.

Rand, on the post mentioned by Whitespark, you have this graphic about various whitehat inbound marketing techniques to use. http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/whitehat-1.gif

I see these techniques: Comment Marketing, Forums, Q+A Sites, News/Media/PR

Aren't some of those techniques a little contradictory to what you said in your video? Isn't comment marketing leaving comments on articles to get a backlink? Same with forum, Q+A Sites, News/Media/PR.

We could almost say that the easiest it is to get a link, the more chances this link is spammy. The good backlinks are hard to get!

As Rand mentioned on the video, he was talking about followed comments (specifically this can apply to forums) and those people with that alternative would have been commenting for the sake of getting a link and not outreach/engagement practices.

This also goes for Q+A sites, whereby well written answers (or comments) and constant engagement with said sites will build you better in the long run rather than in the short term.

Good backlinks are hard to get - true, but the same can be said for traffic conversion, unless you work hard for it! :)

So dofollow commenting is bad practise but social engagement is good? This sounds all well and good but at what point is my comment social engagement?

And at what point am I not contributing/engaging people enough? At what point would my comment be considered spam?

It's all well and good to name these things and call them good/bad but without a solid definition of what each one is then it's a little irrelevant. Sure we can say generic 'Well done on the post' is probably spam, but sometimes it isn't. Or that a post appearing well thought through is for social engagement, but sometimes it.

Like many things in SEO it's 99% a grey area, there's no line where I'm suddenly a spammer or suddenly being socially engaging.

The practise is essentially the same it's just the intent which is different. The difference between white and black hat is very blurred as it is, the difference between gaming the system in a good way or a bad way may be an obvious thing SEOs desire; but in practise an impossible thing to agree on.

Dick - yeah, we try to keep WB Friday to <12 mins so it's hard to cover a ton of content, but fair point. I would say, however, that http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4 has hundreds of tips, and I've written dozens of times on tactics that are sustainable, long term and really do work.

Just a note... I suggest to listen again the first minute of the WBF, where Rand is saying that AM still works and that not all the article marketers provide shit content (or provided shit content) just for the sake of a link.

Totally agree with this post - Rand is a good guy, and credit for developing a great and hugely respected site, but it isn't that easy to garner links like seomoz does by being a market leader. I am not advocating major blackhat tactics, but everything google does now seems to be helping big sites and not appreciating small sites.

This kind of article/topic spinning is happening more and more on social too, I see people linking to the same pages on theior site from tweets multiple times a day... social can be easily gamed just as much as standard seo.

"...how about you stop telling us what link building techniques you don't believe work.."

As if Rand is God! He is absolutely brilliant and I aspire to be like him in the future. Why does he need to spoon-feed the whole SEO community? Figure some things out by yourself if you wanna complain about this type of video content.

Have you ever used the search fuction of this site? You can practically find everything you need (from how to write an outreach email to how to use Q&A site for inbound marketing and link building purposes...)

Or have you ever looked into the public Q&A? They are a huge source of ideas.

And shame you are not PRO... because in that case you could also check the recorded webinars...

"I think to myself, imagine, imagine if you were doing something authentic. Imagine if you were doing real high quality SEO and inbound marketing. Imagine if instead of doing that, you got 50 more Twitter followers that day and you shared a bunch of good stuff and you wrote one guest post that maybe only went to one site, but that link lasted for the next 10 years. Imagine what you've lost when you spend time doing this kind of crap."

I agree, I am all about what works... short term gain is money in my pocket most of the time. I wouldn't ever rely on a single source for my links, be they blogs, comments, directories, article marketing, or great quality engaging content... Spread the eggs over many baskets and if one falls, make a note and move on. I think you summed it up well when you said that "What really sucks is that sometimes it works", that is a good thing to me. If it works, it works. Google aren't as smart as you give them credit for which is why so many people are able to game the system and make loads of money out of it, there are coutless examples of companies using these tactics and getting rankings for it.

@DickGrayson I agree with you. Article marketing is something to include in a broader link profile. But you should only target articles directories which have a real moderator only accepting quality and unique articles. Just read the latest published articles to judge the quality and use copyscape to check uniqueness.

Article spinning is ridiculous and surely doesn't work but if you publish quality content to a quality article directory, it's worth it. This is mainly to increase your link diversity. Yes guest posts are better but 1000 times harder to get.

I don't mean to be offensive Rand, but we need to stay objective when reviewing tactics. I completely understand your feelings on the "the scummiest, lowdownest, dirtiest, ugliest, messiest, nastiest, no goodnesst things of all in the SEO world". The WBF seemed more geared towards 'spinning' and scraping articles but I recommend real article marketing. I offer UNIQUE articles containing 100% unique and useful content to the article directories. I've been doing this article marketing for some time now and see that the links really do help the site's ranking.

"A fantastic piece of content"... that's your problem right there. 99% of articles "spun" out there are copyright infringing garbage. How can you honestly believe that this type of content is adding to value of the web as a whole? "Spin" the situation all you want, but tactics like those are polluting the web.

I'm not sure what video you watched DickGrayson, but the one I watched he stated near the end what the best way to do articles to optimize quality and conversions. So he stated what in theory shouldn't work and then stated what he thought would work.

SEOmoz is here to provide us with long term quality Search Engine techniques and to steer us away from what they think is short term and potentially hurtful.

Thanks for the post Rand and I totally agree - these content pirates really get under my skin. They don't care about the quality of their content nor how much it mucks up the SERPs which leads to a poor user experience and trash-filled search results. I work in the lead generation space so of course i have to contend with this on a daily basis from publishers as well as competitors. As long as folks think they can squeeze a buck out of crappy content then the sky is the limit.

Recently, I contacted a very well known seo agency hoping they could assist me with link building - we have many websites in 15+ verticals so the work load is enormous (I'll admit that I also hate link building)... I was furious with the proposal that i got back from them: no real link building or link discovery BUT tactics that included trash article marketing, forum spam, press releases announcing non-news, and directory submissions for - wait for it - $100 per submission! WHAT?!?! They even had the audacity to propose charges of 20%+ in fees to spit back my own analytics reports. I waited a full day to respond b/c I was too angry to reply immediately. For a well known agency that has reps speaking at large SEO events, I find this incredibly irresponsible but it makes me realize how endemic the problem is.

In my response back to the agency, I reviewed the proposal, line by line, and explained why these tactics were not only bad SEO practice but bad for my business and bad for the industry in general. The agency rep wrote back with an apology stating that they had used a 'template' in error and would write another proposal (presumably one that didn't treat me like an idiot). I politely declined stating that our business interests were not aligned. I won't name the company in this forum but I will certainly make sure that my colleagues and business associates steer clear of them in the future. SEO professionals have had to work hard to regain trust in the market after so many years of hucksters and snake oil salesman selling false hope and setting unrealistic expectations while raking in huge sums of cash. Looks like we still have a long way to go as an industry.

Not sure if some of this comment has been covered or not - I tried to read through the comments already posted, but don't have an hour to finish :)

I've been online in different forms over the past 12 years: my own retail store/website, an affiliate site (when I didn't have the budget to compete against the Zappos's of the world), in-house SEO, SEO consultant.

I've seen almost all of the tools that promise "quick-fix SEO", "links to immediately take you to the top of Google results", etc.

Over those 12 years, I have come full circle. I am at the point of doing "Rand's type of SEO" for clients. BUT, my biggest beef with all of this stuff on SEOmoz is still that - even if you do it the right way - you STILL NEED ANCHOR TEXT LINKS to compete with the big boys in just about any competitive vertical. It's just a fact... and article marketing an easy way to do that. I'm not talking about spinning 100 variations of 1 article. I'm talking about pushing artlces out to a few different "crappy directories" or "junky blogs" in order to get some anchor text bump. It still works.

So I would be interested in a WhiteBoard Friday that explains some strategies on how to get anchor text links to actually take that next step in rankings after you do things "by the book of Rand" and you're still sitting at #22 for most of your keyword targets.

Still love SEOmoz - just need some advice for real-world small business clients who want results - but don't want shady tactics...

THANK YOU! That is absolutely what article marketing is for... obtaining diversified anchor text links. That is pretty much its sole purpose.

You definitely don't want to spam the internet with super low quailty content, but submitting quality articles that make sense and provide value if someone where to stumble across them is in no way shape or form a scam.

Legitimate article marketing will continue to be a viable link building strategy until Google decides that they will no longer look at anchor text as a signal of how to rank a website.

So what's an honest SEO to do when up against a competitor getting top rankings using article marketing / blog syndication? I like these practical and quality link building tips from the smart folks over at SEER:

That's exactly how i would describe that. These two marketers will always exists. I Think newbies will follow the first marketer and advanced marketers the seconds.I guess i am a newbie right now trying to find a way to get my site rank fast with tools like Spin Rewriter 3.0 for rewriting my articles and post each unique article around the internet and create backlinks.

Rand, I wish you had gone about this differently. Instead of berating article marketing for what it has become, I wish you had contrasted the right way to do it vs. the wrong way to do it. I've been in this industry for years and never, ever associated guest blog posts with article marketing. I've also never associated adding a good piece of content to my website as article marketing.

Article marketing is a simple process: create a piece of content, submit that piece of content to be published, include a link or two in that content to pass some juice to your site. Speaking strictly in these terms of article marketing, there is a right way to do it, and a wrong way.

I suppose I don't need to get into the wrong way as you've described it pretty well. Spinning is always a bad idea. Translating the article into German and then back into English to rewrite it is a bad idea. You definitely explained the wrong way to do article marketing. Unfortunately, this is what people think article marketing is now. They don't even realize there is a right way to do it.

First, write an article that is between 500-1,000 words. Most article directories require this length. Second, identify all the valuable article directories out there. Buzzle, Ezinearticles, Goarticles and others are a good place to start. Submit your original piece of content to ONE of them. Now, register with all the good ones out there. Use the same author name every time. Each day, write a new article, submit it to a new article directory, and watch it get published with backlinks to you.

Manual directory submissions in this manner that are not automated and not written by robot article spinner 5000's are very effective. You are putting out a piece of good content that explains one specific topic in detail. It is original and not duplicated on your site or other article sites. It has a contextual link with good anchor text pointing to you. Isn't this exactly the type of thing search engines are looking for? This has been done with great success many, many times.

Perhaps I will post a YouMoz about the right way vs. the wrong way of doing article marketing.

The only thing I'll add is that I think this idea of Article Marketing is simplified to spreading content around fishing for leads instead of building a base of leveragable and indexable content for your brand.

your WBF hit a strong painful open wound in my SEO body: because I see it everyday how article marketing works fine and good not just on the short term, but also in the loooong one. Somehow, with just few differences, it is something very similar to the directory tactic. Very 2000 but working still. I remember the frustration of Wil Reynolds about this same topic, when he was seeing how websites working right with inbound, social and creative link building tactics were outranked by those ones still using directories, article marketing and paid links (the feral triad of SEO).

And it is a painful open wound for me because I see how - also and maybe especially here in Italy - this tactic is so much used and I get sick when in I read article marketing website owners claiming that their sites are quality ones, therefore they won't get penalized by Panda or other Google updates. And do you know what? They really aren't because it is not ranking what they are interested about, but PageRank. Article Marketing sites live thanks to the fact they sell their 3/4/5 PageRank status, something that it is indipendent from Pandarank factors... and because even though their PR has been cut, it is still quite high thanks to the link back policy they still practice.

Even though you're right, I think you don't focus perfectly the problem: it is not traffic from article marketing sites that SEOs looks for: it is that 0,03 of PageRank value directed to their site from that link in the article. That is why spinning and republishing the same content in hundreds of article portals (to not talk about how some of these article portals republish their article into others websites).

Why is this tactic still working? What piss me off is that if it clear that it is a tactic whose purpose if to artificially modificate the linkgraph, why Google is not simply banishing them if they don't follow some simple content rules? It should not be so difficult: if an article portal has not a certain % of original content, it won't be listed in the SERPs for the keyword "article marketing" and similar.

And, to end my rant, I think that a serious review by Google would be useful for those ones who want to rely and live with this tactic too, as those sites that would survive from the cleaning would be somehow "indirectly" receiving a quality accreditation and maybe this could make article marketing something useful for real.

You hit the point... and that is why article marketing (also without the spinning) is still so alive and kicking in Italy... enhancing the low quality content the serps usually show. Infact, IMO, Panda has hit quite a lot, but not enough. If you see the Searchmetrics data ( http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2011/08/22/google-panda-update-in-italy-and-spain-winners-and-losers/ )you will see many blogs aggegrator, but no article marketing site (why??) and, more, you can see within the winners Blogspot, a classical platform for cheap article marketing portals...

While I agree with the sentiment of this video and with Rand's position on low quality tactics like article marketing, the fact that remains that tactics like this work, particularly in smaller niches or for local busineses.

As an SEO consutant, we are constantly put in the position of having to decide between lower quality, quick fix tactics that competitors are using (and succeeding with), versus high-quality but harder to implement strategies.

I think that we who live in the bubble of the web forget how things work in the "real world". It is diffult for me to show measurable ROI for, say, a local plumber to put all the time and expense into blogging, creating content, and building links that way versus his competitiors that go out and just buy links, or distribute crappy articles that gain links back. I see these tactics work again and again and for a fraction of the cost of good content development and distribution.

There is a disconnect, I believe, between the high minded ideals of SEO that will work for large, nationally targetting companies in niches where content bears a great more importance, and small local businesses trying to operate in viciously competitive (albeit small) markets where no tactic is off the table if it works.

Maybe if Google actually did a good job of policing these local business keywords, or at least even-handedly applying their spam/webmaster guidelines to them. But until that happens, low quality techniques are going to continue to work and SEOs and business are going to be forced into them by shear necessity.

Rand admitted these tactics still might work...in the short term. But sooner or later you're going to have the Google hammer come down on you. And as long as you're using these tactics, you're always going to looking behind your back, wondering when G is going to find out.

I also get tired of hearing people bitch and moan that small businesses can't compete. That's bullshit! The problem is that you as a consultant have to convince them to commit the resources necessary to compete online. Perhaps more importantly, you have to convince them that they can’t just outsource everything to you. They have to be involved for it to be authentic. The small businesses who commit the resources and the energy will become bigger businesses and the small business with all the excuses will fail or stay small.

I've been working with small business clients for nearly 2 years and I have yet to see the dreaded "Google Hammer" come down on these practices. While I don't use them with my clients, we compete with those who do and I can tell you for certain - they do work.

Maybe we all need to step outside the Google fanzone for a minute and realize that Google isn't perfect, and that this kind of crap still gets through.

I am tired of people saying "oh, it will only work in the short term". How short are we talking here? Cos these tactics seem to be creating sustainable success.

As for your second point, I think that's really unrealistic. Are you honestly telling me that I'm suppose to tell the plumber or electrician that is having to make the decision whether or not to lay off workers that he should be blogging more? Are you kidding me?

It's just not that simple and we have a responsibity to understand small businesses and the difficult enviornment they operate in rather than just arrogantly stating "oh, they just don't GET it".

The odds are not stacked in small business favor and they are certainly not in favor of small business SEO done the right way. Will it stay that way - I certainly hope not - but for now all I see is local queries with top results achieved with bs techniques.

"Are you honestly telling me that I'm suppose to tell the plumber or electrician that is having to make the decision whether or not to lay off workers that he should be blogging more?"

Maybe!

I think we all agree (most of us anyway) Google needs to do a better job at stopping the gaming. But most of the guys who are dominating the SERPS with paid link strategies are already on to the next thing that works. And the guys who are struggling are still spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on stinking yellow pages ads that end up in the recycling bin before they ever go in someone's home.

The plumber or electrician who's faced with laying off workers right now is not in that position because of competitors' paid link strategies, they're most likely in that position because they were late to the online game. People still need plumbers, right?They probably have a crappy 5 year old website, no real revies or recommendation and have website and few willing to recommend them. I can't believe I'm saying this, but they should have been buying links 5 years ago. Those who were buying links 5 years ago are now jumping into social meda. And the struggling guys are still trying to convince you that they're getting leads from the yellow pages.

As I'm actually basing these examples on real clients I've had - I simply can't agree.

I understand what you're saying about the education gap - I think we all struggle with that. But I think there is a false assumption that every niche moves at the same pace in terms of online media.

Plumbing and electrician markets are still back in the early 2000's of buying links and spammy tactics. But, because that is the norm in that industry, Google doesn't seem to be penalizing those strategies.

You say people who were dominating the SERPs with paid links are on to the next thing. That is, I'm sorry, categorically false. Because some a former clients, I don't want to call people out. But look at the link graph for the top listings for "seattle electrician" and "seattle plumber" and tell me how "advanced" their tactics are.

One thing I find strange is that in my experience, directory links with exact match keyword anchor text still work. Some of our competitors still rank on the strength of this kind of stuff alone. Google is getting better at dealing with spam but I don't think they've solved the problem of how to get away from the exploitable anchor text model.

It made me sick to my stomach just hearing you talk about this Rand. There are so many people (SEO's and clients) looking to make a quick buck or two that they miss the lasting effects of something authentic.
I love it that every week it seems SEOmoz is just trying to encourage everyone to be real on the web and they will benefit greater than if they were to create something fake.
I can think of several job opportunities that I could have taken that were sold to me as "SEO" positions when in actuallity they were just big facades that will soon be revealed as fake. Glad I learned early on that being real online is way better than trying to fool everyone.
Really good stuff!

In the end of the day the ones who will get hurt the most are the small business clients who usually do not have alot of money and will look for a quick fix with SEO, these scammy article spinning companies and operations know that and that is why they put out these flashy $299.99 BUY IT NOW & RANK NOW style crap to scam in the smaller business. It is really shocking that these guys do this becuase not only do they make a bad name for their own company they also make a bad name for the whole SEO industry.

The thing is with larger businesses who have in house SEO, yet outsource SEO to Agency, they are smart and they will want quality time and time aggain.

I've brought up a similar point before - the people who are going to get burnt most by these tactics at some point are the small businesses. It's generally the small businesses tipping their toes into the world of seo that willl end up paying at the lower end of the spectrum to someone calling himself an seo who just builds spun article links and comment + forum spam.

The issue is that people don't know better, if I was a small biz owner and didn't get seo and his results worked then I'd think he was brilliant - not knowing that if G ever get on top of link spamming that my site could be burnt. If I rely on my site for my income to live then the results could be catastrophic.

One of the possible difficulties that a SOHO/SMEs business face is small budgets. Small budgets in SEO = as much automation as possible. Article market/forum spam is highly automated and therefore more likely within their budget.

What is really need is alternative which can fit their budget and work. Possible solution could include get links from vendors, customers they sell to, guest posts etc.

Great point. But when small business do this and gain advantage and are not penalized by G it's difficult not to copy their strategy, especially when spam reports to G through webmaster have no effect.

Well said! I had several small business owners say to me that they can't afford to pay a real SEO and that they don't have the time to wait until the effects of "low cost white hat SEO" (if it really was a thing like that) really kicks in.

With the recession on their shoulders and a budget like $300 they would rather go with anything else that might manipulate their website into the SERPs and hope that it will stay there for at least a few months. At least during those months they hope to get out something of their useless website thats been only an expense for them until now.

And I have at least 3 to 4 conversations like that every week with small business owners and that just makes me really sad! They know they shouldn't do it, sometimes they also know what they should do instead, but they just don't have the money to pay for someone who can turn that around for them.

It just doesn't sound right to try and justify less than authentic marketing on an economic situation. The idea and point is that if a company puts that "small" budget into quality, they will see the benefits. There are other ways of getting fast results using authentic methods.
I explained it to a client this way. Before the internet, when a company wanted to get their name/product out there they would do some talking and networking by going to other businesses and such. Now adays if you want to get fast results put some queality time in a social media campaign which might include a good article strategy. This seems much like the old sidewalk stompin to me.
It seems to almost always come down to action on a good business model that has an outlook on future growth. I understand it isn't always that clear cut but a majority of the time it can be boiled down to simply doing what you know is true and honest and not decietful.

I'd better prepare myself for a barrage of criticism here but I'm going to put in a little defense from the other perspective. We have some very small businesses who would never get any online presence due to having a practically zero budget, and they are struggling to stay afloat as it is. For them, and because it works and it gets them some very, very much needed business, we commission articles to be written and we distribute them.

They are well written, we make sure of that and always use the same, excellent copywriter. But, they're far from original and are not really of much value. However, we're a business not a charity, and if we were to do what is suggested for these people at what they're paying we'd be working at a loss, and they don't have the money to pay any more than the meager amount they already do (which is very little and really we shouldn't even work for them but they're our first clients from when we first started and we under-charge them for our time to help them out anyway).

The economy is causing some of them to suffer. I.e. due to the housing market, less people are moving house, so the removal firm which has been going for 25-ish years that we do such work for gets no business anywhere except for a small amount from having some good rankings on Google. They're making just enough to stay a-float and often we wait months without payment as we know how bad things are for them.

If we stopped doing this, they'd lose what little business they have. If we changed what we do for them we'd go down ourselves as we'd be working mostly for free.

I totally understand what's being said, and I couldn't agree more. Creativity and value in all content is so, so much better. All I'm trying to say is that the ethics behind some of it (and it is spam, low level spam but still spam) might be a little more complicated than people might think. I do hate spam, and I don't condone it for one minute... in this situation however, I will publish well written but low quality content for links, as the alternative is worse for some people.

PS. Contrary to the video, the operating costs are much, much less than anything else, hence my whole comment.

Sorry, yes I will clarify. The articles are basic and serve no real purpose. It's unlikely that anybody will really want to read them, or that they would gain any real value from them if they did. However, all of the information within them is researched, correct, original and they're written with proper English in terms of grammar, spelling, etc... i.e. They make perfect sense and read well.

These methods might be all that the client can afford but the results are probably short term and after Panda they could be really short term.

So, instead of spending the small budget on these methods for complete devaluation later perhaps the budget should instead be spent on tactics that might have a lower yield in the short term but have lower risk and evergreen value.

Hi EGOL, yes I totally agree. In fact I really, really am totally against doing it... it's like Rand says in the video, "what's Google's plan, what do they want in the long term?!" And I know this is far, far from it. Also, it's not exactly enjoyable SEO either.

However, for the moment it does get them short term rankings and if we stop, those rankings drop. The lower yield in the short term is not really an option. Even with good rankings they're not getting enough business.

There is certainly risk involved, but for these customers it's a necessary risk. I just don't like it because I hate how there's so much crap on the web, and there I am adding more to it.

Ah yes, you hit the nail on the head there. I think in this particular case it is all about how the client views their time line... almost like, they can't worry about too far in the future for the moment as things are so uncertain, they just want to make it through the day. I kind of know the feeling too as we have that every time we get hit by our VAT bill lol.

I know of SEO company's who just do aticle marketing and charge $2,500 for it.

It doesn't matter whether an article is uniquely written or spun - if it is produced with the intention of just getting link juice by someone who has no passion for the topic it is junk. You may as well use a random article generator - btw has anyone used a random article generator to produce content? haha

I hand spin a lot of content on my websites but that is mainly to avoid dup content penalties. If I write a great tutorial on "how to unlock your iphone 4" and I also want an guide called "how to unlock your iphone 5" then it makes perfect sense to rework that existing content into an original piece since it only takes 5 minutes and the old information is aplicable to the new use.

I have been guilty of autospinning and submitting and it does work sometimes but it is just junk. In all honesty 99% of article directories shouldn't rank at all as they provide very little value.

Article spinning and submitting will continue though until Google comes up with an AI capable of actually understanding content - until then we are stuck with spamda

Indeed Joshua.... I hate the fact that spammy article marketing can work at the moment. It can be difficult sometimes, to guide clients away from this when they see it working for competitors. I think I'll direct people to this video in the future when they want to pursue this kind of spammy tactic. It'll likely save me a lot of time trying to explain everything :-)

I think the BIGGEST reason not to pursue spammy tactics like this is the opprotunity cost for sure. It amazes me how many people want to build an entire business based soley upon tricking Google.

Exactly, while Article Spinning still works people will still employ it. Doesn't make it right, but a lot of people like to use shortcuts. When G sort out article sites, then people can moan about the next 'trick.'

Probably the most important part of this WBF was discussing the conversion rate, this is the what the client should be focused on.

I have to agree here. It seems most of the criticism of AM is based on the premises of 1) starting with crappy content and 2) auto-spinning it.

If you start with GREAT content, and hand-spin it... then what? Is that really so bad?

The challenge I face with my current clients, as well as my own new business, is that there's no base to build on. We can write all the great content in the world, but we have to get some people there to see it. How do we do that? It's NOT going to get ranked on its own simply because it's good content. The AM techniques seem like a good way to get the content in front of more people and give it a fighting chance in the search engines.

What else would you suggest for getting visibility for your quality content for a brand new business/site?

I've seen sites ranking for competitive queries - not even needing exact match domains - based purely on the "trashy" kind of article marketing. So while I agree it isn't the most powerful or holistic approach, it can make you rank.

"Then I see a bunch of nofollow comment spam that you've left on the Web, and I see the articles of low quality that you've submitted everywhere. What am I going to think about your brand?"

The realms of the web where this kind of activity goes on is seldom explored by normal web surfers. So Idoubt that seeing low quality articles or blog comments actually happens that often - although this is a good scare tactic if you want to put the boot in to agencies who do use this tactic.

This is immensely satisfying to see. I worked for about 6 months with a Tokyo-based "marketing" team floudering blindly in the world of SEO. Their plan involved several hundred (I'm not exaggerating) satellite sites filled with crappy articles that were submitted to article directories with links back to client sites. So much time was spent creating the sites, creating the articles, putting nofollows into certain articles, outsourcing writers, etc. The amount they spent paying people to do this project could have been better spent doing some REAL marketing. They actively planned around Google algorithms - buying hosting from around the world, splitting up categories of sites by IP address, and more. I knew about 2 weeks into the job that something was fishy.

If your business model is based on not getting caught, there's probably something wrong with your business.

I was promoting a site using guest posts on high page rank sites in my niche. I created really good articles by bridging my topic to other inustries too. I did like 25 guest posts and my rankings didn't change much at all. I created a viral app that shows how fat coffee makes you (it got Tweeted and blogged by Guy Kawasaki, syndicated on a bunch of local t.v. station websites, and I heard Tim Ferris tweeted about it) I did a press release via PRWeb and still, no ranking increase. To be clear, these were important activities, and I'm glad I did them, but as a small business, I can't afford to spend so much time with so little to show for it.

Here's what I recommend: do the crappy, scammy, spammy, no-good stuff as long as it works... then do the high value stuff to cover your tracks.

Making my mark on the web using valuable and unique content and by default, adding value to the web is critical to me, as an SEO'er and to my clients requiring a sustainable and true ROI. Making the web a better and more valuable place I totally agree with. But my profession is Search and Internet Marketing, and I love the diversity and the industrys nuances challenge me.

On the other hand S/ME's primary driver is to "push tin" or reduce costs. The more I "push" or the more I save, the more "value" I have gained from the Web .

If I am in #3 for an exact match .org, with robot article marketing on a feeder site that pushes 100 visits per week, and 6% convert, well given the expense and commitment I will live with that.

Its still cheaper than a local ad in XYZ newspaper/radio.

A lot of the SME's arent thinking sustainability, in fact given that lack or support by Chambers of Commerce or even Google (the 30 day'ers approach) they make really important decisions for commercial survival based upon their email spam. e newsletters, poor SEO's or the findings from a recent WebEx.

As SEO's we cannot knock this approach, our futures and financial commitments aren't invested in stock, rent and staff. This is especially magnified in retailers that have a real store/s where very few customers are turning up to their store, the second orderer no longer exists, their rent is due and they have time on their hands to surf the web and be "sold to".

Rand, you mentioned that rankings can improve (usually for 6/9 months in my experience) and for a vast amount of small retailers that do not have access to alternate knowledge but have time on their hands to search the web, a 6/9 month window of opportunity is all it takes to make that "risky" commitment.

I start to rank in Bing, see some results and all of a sudden that £300 investment in snake oil seems like a decent ROI!

For me, the real waste is the opportunity cost or the Return on Effort. If I had the time/opportunity to invest in the creation of a brand that could be fashioned into a unique and sustainable brand I would be all over it!!

Nice and quality whiteboard Friday post again, as always. Now I am going to share some my thoughts about this very ″controversial″ topic.

Google counts article marketing links

I am totally against any spinning and massive distribution of articles. This type of article marketing totally decreases quality of web and pushes people who want to reach great rankings in short time (or no time). But, do you think that 1-2 guest post will prevail hundreds of spinned articles and outrank thousands of low quality links. (Idea for next post: Quality vs Quantity of backlinks - What do we need more?). I am not sure in that yet, but as you said that is the right way (only good way) if we are working on long terms and publish only quality content. But, what if you have client who wants results in 3 months? How to achieve goals in so short time without this massive distribution of low quality links? Unfortunately, these links still works on short period, and that is main reason for people for using it - they should watch this video and think about what they are really doing. Just to clarify, I am totally against massive article distribution and duplicate content. Most SEO contracts are on 6 or 12 months, but from my experience it sometimes takes 2-3 years of work to accomplish quality which you talk about in this post and in your other posts. But, I’m not worried about people who still prefer and practice this type of backlinks, they will learn their lesson on hard way.

Duplicate content

I am thinking about this problem last few months, but as I am always in some rush didn’t yet write question about duplicate content? Do you know how Google measure duplicate content? Do you work on your own version of duplicate content factor or you have this integrated in your PA and DA factors? One day, when search engines solve this issue, internet will be real source of unique and trusted information – that was the primarily idea of whole story.

Quality/value/trustworthiness of the content

That is really important factor in whole story. Who needs low quality content? Who needs advices which are not trustworthy? Nobody. Period.

Something real and useful

Yup, that is what you’re talking whole time and that is main reason for my visiting this blog and follows people connected with seomoz. Hope I wasn’t to boring today. My intention was to show Rand and others good people here there is many people from other side who actually read their posts and thinks about that.

One particular article marketing provider was the quickest guarantee to a penalty I have ever seen. Honestly, if the service wasn't $2K a pop, it would be a great way to bowl just about any site for any keyword.

It's black hat tactics like article spinning that give the SEO industry a bad name. The most frustrating part is when a client sees the competition doing at, and succeeding because of it, so that's what they want me to do. I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain why article spinning is a bad thing! I think a lot of small business owners are intimidated by how much content they really need to start producing, so they look for a shortcut.

There is always a lot of confirmation bias to deal with. They see the competitor doing great using those tactics but they don't connect the dots when the same competitors rankings drop 3 months later. "Oh, that's just Google".

Article marketing, like off topic forum and blog commenting and other dubious link building tactics, will only ever be truly eliminated from SEO, when they no longer work!

Also down to a flaw in the search engines algorithm, why so many SEO's use these tactics to manipulate the search engine ranking results, beacuse they work!

My stance on this has softened considerably, initially horrified that articles on any topic and low quality directories + social bookmarks would rank sites well. However, if can help genuine small businesses, who are not just trying to get something on the cheap! To compete and become profitable, then tactics worth employing as long as do not impact on clients sites brand and genuine search engine ranking results for certain keywords.

I’m a small business with limited resources and fairly new to SEO and new to SEO Moz (about 3 months now). It is very difficult and very time consuming for a little guy to play catch up with competitors that have been heavily involved in SEO for many years. I hired a so called SEO who used black hat tactics and my best keyword page went to #3 one day and the next day it disappeared completely from Google. It took 8 months to get indexed again and I am way down in the ranks. A year later and out a bunch of money I was worse off than when I started (my motivation for joining SEOMOZ)

Rand, thanks for having the balls to speak up and help beginners like me understand the theory behind the search engines. Every business wants to be number one on Google and when someone walks in the door with a SEO plan that fits a small business budget it is easy to get hooked in. Understanding SEO for most businesses is like speaking a foreign language. You hire an interpreter and hope they are giving you the right message. At least when I read the SEO MOZ postings, I can get both sides of the issues and decide for myself if I want to cross into the gray.

Thanks for the reply, we have sent out a few and they were picked up by quite a few sites, including Yahoo News, San Francisco Chronicle, quite a few other City News organization in big markets, and tech blogs.

Hard to tell if the links will be vauble or not but we are seeing a small amount of traffic come through the various pickups.

Just wanted to make sure we could not over do it or otherwise hurt our efforts. All articles are well written and helpful. -- Steven

I am not really sure about the 'riskiness' when it comes to branding, can the average user even tell a spammy site from a quality site? Sure content can be crap but as long as it's not on your site it's not a problem, I don't think an user would know the who, what, whys and wheres by following a link from a crap article.

@Rand... as usual great post here...been preaching the same to all the forum newbies over at seochat for years....they disagree TOTALLY with your point...and my own....sigh...seems like the temporary "lift" they get from same means success to them...course, then they're back in a few months complaining bitterly that their sites have been penalized etc etc....

and like @Egol above, I too think that Google should link to this post for edification of ALL folks new to online marketing...might just help!

Wow, Rand, emotional today. I've had a feeling article marketing was going in the tank, but never had the confidence to really share my thoughts. Until now! You put into words what I was looking for. In the past I've had success with article marketing and manual spinning, but it has been far and few between these last two years. Love your conviction about this, I think I'll focus the time I spend on AM elsewhere from now on.

So in the end, it's not about the tricks, but about being real and being authentic in the online world. That sincerity extends to the reputation of your company AND your product! Good job Rand. For a second there, I wasn't sure if your head was about to explode, but just glad it didn't. ^_^

I'm concerned that a message of 'all article marketing is fake, bad or a trick for rank' is being conveyed here. There are many out there who take short cuts, but I still believe that when done properly with the original intent of those article directories, REAL Article Marketing is an additional tool in the toolbox of SEO.

Perhaps the title of this article is misleading. Perhaps the title should have been Article Spinning: Blah blah blah.... instead of article marketing.

Also, as these techniques are only used for link building it's interesting to see the results thrown up by SEOMoz's software concerning what constitutes a good link. Forum sig links, link farm directories etc. I know you guys aren't endorsing these links but people like our friend above starting out in their SEO career are using the tools you provide to direct their work. It's no wonder content based link building is still popular, at least it feels like you're earning a link.

I think the crux of the situation is that Google allows an environment where article spinning, link wheels, blog commenting, profile creation, rss feed submission/pinging, etc etc DO work with varying degrees of success for varying lengths of time. If/when Google finally catches on, there are 10 more crappy sites to replace the one that was penalized for using those methods.

If you know how to do keyword/niche research, all you need to do is repeat and rinse, and you will make some serious bank.

And sure, Panda caught a few culprits, but Panda is just a band-aid on a broken leg - on purpose. Do you really think Google wants to police and shut down ALL of the shitty sites out there keeping the Adsense machine a'hummin? Hell no.

Google stopped being a search company years ago. The almighty dollar runs their world now, and there is no way that is going to change any time soon.

@ Mgracen : I've been waiting for someone to point out that Google profits from the race to the bottom. G introduced Panda only after the SERPs became intolerable for the average searcher under far too many topics. Adwords makes money at little cost to G. With so little competition for search and so much to be made from Adwords, why should G spend money on major improvements? If the search results became more relevant and truly more authoritative than the Adwords, G's profits would go down. For years, G has rewarded the "latest and greatest" feature. Today, the great gimmick appears to be videos. Tomorrow, it will be something else more expensive which further limits entry to the market. The object is to create novelty which keeps eyes on G, not to sort through meaningful content. I've noticed that many investment sites (some disposable, others not) mix unrelated videos or newscasts into their site to provide "content".

The problem I have with the article is the use of the word scam. Article marketing is a low value activity but that doesn't make it a scam.

Pre-Panda, I was ranking well for some articles I wrote for Ezine and Yahoo / Associated Content and I wouldn't call that a scam in any way. However post Panda, it's clear that article marketing is no longer a viable strategy but that doesn't mean a company or individual arguing for an article marketing strategy is a scammer.

As a site owner the most frustrating part is opening up guest blogging and receiving some real junk content as you've described. If the content isn't bad enough, sometimes its the spelling and grammar, I mean, really, why bother? Well as you've said, sometimes it works. Sometimes site owners don't check content and publish anything just to get content up.

However the 20% of articles we receive that add value are of high quality and add value to our readers which is all I'm asking for, for the currency of one 'followed' link. A number of these are shared within facebook and twitter by our users so not only are the readers perceiving the article as useful, we're increasing our engagement and trust.

This also creates perpetual motion of attracting further quality writers as they see we don't simply post anything so we're completely behind guest blogging in this way. My only concern has been the duplicate content issue but I'm guessing things like copyscape are best for this?

A fantastic video from Rand as usual. I agree that article spinning is one of the things that is bringing down the collective IQ of the web. I do also think that one, unique, well-written article is an ok thing even if it's posted on Ezine or one of the article directories... I think some content will actually stand out when it's withiin an ocean of the 99.9% crap that these sites tend to contain. So I would never tell a client not to use these sites as a rule, I would just tell them to write something REAL and to only post it once.

Rand, I think SEOMoz should do a video addressed to small business clients, those who have only $300 or so per month to spend, and cover the bases of why tactics like spinning are not a good use of their budget. Something from a layman's point of view, speaking to non-SEOs, but that that this community could use to help sell the case for good SEO.

What's the chance that the average visitor will have any idea whether or not a site uses "spammy blog comments" to get links? Unless you run a site about SEO, or even related topics, what percentage of site visitors are REALLY going to do a backlink analysis to make sure that you are getting only high quality inbound links? I'd venture to guess than less than 5% of most web users even know what a backlink is.

Even if a site has a bunch of spammy inbound links, as long as the site provides value and good content, does it really matter where their links are coming in from? Legit sites use the same greyhat techniques to build up links as spammy made-for-adsense sites do.

I'm not saying that comment spam is a good thing, and it's not something I'd recommend to any of my clients, but you've got to look at it from an average user's perspective, not the perspective of an SEO. As long as the site provides the user with value, I doubt the user will care about where some off-site links are coming from.

Do you really realize you call a tactic you mention as "sometimes works for a year" as scam? I love scams like this.

I hate to bring you news from the evil side of the world, but anyways.. Looks like this video has been put up on August 2011. After a few months today, this evil scam still works. And not "sometimes" and not for "just months". It works everytime, and the sites that i gave initial boosts in rankings with article marketing 2-3 years ago (along with all other evil scumbag linkbuilding tactics) still ranks very good for all my keywords. I shamelessly spin my content. Actually not my content, i scrape articles from other scam portals, shuffle sentences from each (i am an evil programmer), and spin it. I make sure it is total garbage and distribute it to hundreds of sites with my evil robot. And it works every single time. There has not been any instance that i didn't get a dramatic response as far as rankings go.

Now, being ethical and speaking the truth are completely different concepts. Without doubt there could be a debate about article marketing being ethical or what not. But there is no debate about if it works or not. It works. Simply that is the truth. So anyone who is saying the opposite,

a) never tried it

b) trying to make people not use it so there is less competition

c) obsessed with white hat and charging clients thousands of dollars for their ethical sales copies

on a side note, to give you credit, if i operated a company with multi million dollar revenues, i wouldn't risk my web site doing such things. i would be a good kid.

but when you are in niches like, california x ray technician schools, big surprise there is not many real people who writes about this stuff. you can put up the greatest web site ever and expect real people to link to you but that will take ages, if not never. and you will watch your web site dragging on 10th page while the evil guy with the robot takes over the whole first page.

Do you sincerely and naively think Google does not know about these for years, and they have no power to stop it? 5 months after your video they still did not. They might crack on it tomorrow, next month or next year. Until then we will continue to be evil scumbags.

Until it's proven otherwise, I believe good quality article marketing still works, even after Google devalued all of these spammy networks. It still comes back to the fact that you can't rank for competitive keyword phrases without getting anchor text links. Do it in a quality way - and syndicate to quality sites - and it works.

Now if Google comes out and completely devalues anchor text links as a ranking factor, THEN we're talking chaos. But I can't see that happening anytime soon, can you? If it does, then the biggest brands most likely dominate every search result...

When I meet clients for the first time, I often find myself mentioning article marketing and content farms in the same sentence as part of the usual tough love talk on starting every search visibilty initiative with VALUE.

I would start writing an authentic article a day and posting it on my blog. Spend another hour trying to build a community of like-minded people who may be potential customers on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Within one year, I built the Journey Mexico Blog to a really well ranking source for credible insight about travel in Mexico. We have thousands of followers who all speak highly of our brand, and I was recently hired by governmental initiative to promote Mexico through blogging because of my efforts. Now we have an assistant to handle the social media side, but for about 8 months, it was just me.

On my personal blog Simply Vallarta, I made one satirical xtranormal video called "Safety of Mexico" that went "semi-viral" within certain circles, which brought me 500 facebook fans and 300 twitter followers in a weekend. It's amazing how quickly/easily you can build real communities of people who care about what you're doing if you just give them authentic content of worth.

Perhaps you could build up some additional funds (saving, loans, investments or grants) and then directly market your quality product or service to a targeted audience so that they become brand advocates!! - Once that has time to generate some organic buzz, then start leveraging online search in combination with additional high-value content!!!!

The focus should be on connecting users to your quality product/service/resource, and not on trying to convince people that you offer something of quality when it is not - and this should form a solid foundation for a sustainable business.

It's almost like saying - My front wall is interesting, how can I get 300 people to pay to see it (When it should be, how can I make my wall interesting, so that as many people as possible will find it interesting and would WANT to pay money to see it!)

But if you write unique content which is not posted in you own site and get backlink to it from different good article directory sites, it will help to support your ranking other than that i am 100% agree that this stuff simply wastge of your time...

I can't help but feel the pain reading this article. Article spinners? Whatever happened to the art of writing? Articles and blog posts work when they offer real value and not cyber space junk. There are even times when so much have been written about a topic that it makes no real sense to write another blog post about it, unless it offers something new.

If i can add something it's just that in the real world a lot of seo's are aware of the danger of using article marketing too much, but sadly they continue to use it because it is easy to set up and as you (Rand) said article marketing sometimes bring results (good positions).

Thus, i think, if you use article marketing carefully to provide informations on your new products or about some discounts on your ecommerce website it's gonna work if the content of your website changes at the same time! I have personnaly observe it on such of my websites

PMSL Rand - that actually made me laugh so much - your level of sarcasm towards article marketing is about the same as mine - i am forwarding this to my boss right now in hopes he understands that this is NOT the way to do online marketing!

Interesting post Rand. I think supplementing a larger link builiding strategy with article marketing is fine in the short term as it can give an immediate lift.

The problem as you point out is that many SEO's completely rely on article marketing for their link building. As a result their creative portfolios look terrible. I'm fine with this as it saves the more interesting, creative accounts for those of us that want to do interesting and creative work.

Maybe another way of pushing your point is this.

If SEO businesses want to be taken seriously with the client, be more involved in marketing and brand strategy. Or pitch for and win big, blue chip multi-national, multi-lingual clients on a regular basis. THEY NEED TO GET SERIOUS WITH CONTENT STRATEGY.

It's time to look outside of spammy, easy to do, small effect strategies and create content that real websites would love to publish.

I really hate to see that what is commonly considered as a good practise you always destroy it i 12 minutes. Now, I must go to read again your White SEO articles for increasing my self esteeme, because believe me, articles like this, are a bit depressive for some of us.

For those who felt the pain with this video, I recommend http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

Thanks Rand, you're like the person that tell us Santa Claus are our fathers.

Has anybody here ever heard of (or used) LFE (Link Farm Evolution). A program that creates pseudo-unique content out of pre-defined tetx blocks and spreads it all over the web, mostly to blogs. Spreading horrible content has never been so easy.

The thing is, clients or "professionals" who tend to use tools like LFE to just spread non-content on the web are also often the ones who are immune to good advice. As BenRWoodard already mentioned in the first comment here, they are out for a quick buck, no long-term strategy, no ethics.

Thxs Rand..you brought some energy to that WBF. I am an in-house SEO, and field sales calls all the time from cold call SEO's and when I compel them to give up there primary tactic for link building it is always article spinning/submit. Perhaps Google will soon be able to

Differentiate between high quality copy and spin material, and give more weight to the ladder.

I totally agree, and the "alma mater" agency I worked for originally did not use article marketing, however the others I came to did. Currently we've done away with this tactic for the reasons listed.

However, it is interesting to note that Google itself has perpetuated this issue. People realized that links are the key to rankings, and links are much better with surrounding content, so this was the best way to get content and links simultaneously. People (particularly clients) are looking for results and usually aren't patient enough to wait for "natural" links based off excellent content "worth linking to". So they turn to quick solutions. This will continue to be the case forever...when time is a factor and you're competing against website giants, people are looking for the quickest way to get to the top as possible. Without these "grey" tactics, it's nearly impossible for the little guy to keep up, no matter HOW relevant their content is. No one is going to see it, and the guys with the most content and biggest websites will continue to push ahead.

Great Job Rand! Every new SEO should watch this video. I know people said it was more "fired up" than usual and I wanted to crongratulate you on that! I love that you take it persoanlly because we all should. We should be collectively trying to make the web a better place not spam it up! So kuddos!

Well I finally decided to join this site, just to respond to this post. I've been reading for quite some time and your posts have helped to shape me into the SEO I am today.

Rand, I applaud your passion on this issue. What upsets me most is that it IS the small business that get's taken by these tactics. Then when they finally realize that they have wasted their money, they have even less of a budget to spend and now have a very slanted opinion of the people who work in this industry.

Now am I a 100% purist? Well, usually (hehe). I do cut a corner here and there when it's appropriate. I am a one-woman show, afterall. When I hear, "I need to sell this house in the next 6 months!" or "I have someone slandering my name online, can we burry it?" and those types of special projects, I DO want to do what is ultimatley best for my customers and THEIR needs.

But otherwise, I hate what these tactics do to MY experience on the Internet. I HATE having to weed through pages and pages of BS articles litered with adsense ads to find the ONE that gives me the information I was looking for. It's frustrating to say the least. I also hate how these kinds of tactics hurt our clients. They end up costing money they client didn't have to begin with and in this ecomony, a mis-spent $500 on a startup operation could end up costing you the business itself. No one ever thinks about how harmful it CAN be.

Anyhow, I could go on and on, but I have a long to-do list to take care of. Thanks for all that you do here at SEOMOZ. Not sure where I'd be now without you guys being so open with your research and so helpful to your competitors (such as we are).

Rand! We here at Mack Web Solutions think you're awesome! We are proud to stand behind the practices that you work so hard to preach. Thanks to Moz (and you of course) we are confident in guiding our clients to honor quality, not quantity and that good work takes longer, but over time they will be rewarded tenfold. Thanks for all you do and keep standing strong!

Really good video Rand! So much truth in creating high quality unique content and not doing what loads of so called SEO agents do and submit duplicate articles to 100's if not 1000's of really low quality websites. Looking forward to reading some more of your blogs for some pearls of wisdom. FYI I came through to here from ecommercefuel which also has some great info on SEO.

Great WBF, Rand. But I must respectfully disagree on one (relatively) small point...I believe dofollow comments can pass juice and are a legitimate form of backlink building.

Sure, it's easily abused. No, I don't recommend it as a backbone tactic or silver bullet that will guarantee rankings. (So far as I've seen in SEO, no such thing exists.) But I have personally seen instances where a legitimate comment I left on somebody's blog, along with a link to my personal site, resulted in a good backlink. But consider that it was an instance where I wasn't even thinking about optimizing my site or linkbuilding or anything remotely related to SEO - I just wanted to leave a comment in this guy's blog that was pertinent to the topic.

When you talk about doing "something real," I suggest that what you mean is engagement. Actually talkto people who might just give a rip about who you are and what you do. Better yet, talk to people who you actually care about, and who are doing something of interest to you.

Every blogger worth his salt knows that to get traffic, you have to give traffic. You want people talking about you? Talk about them. Call it an echo chamber if you want, but the best blogging is conversational in nature. And very closely related to this is the notion that if you give others attention online, they might just give you some attention - in the form of links, of course. :)

So yes, I believe that dofollowed comment links pass juice. But this is a tactic that should follow engagement, not the other way around.

I came across this article just as I was being asked on skype to do some article-spinning by some guy running an seo 'company' out of NY. Or at least that's what he claims. Too much about his offer was shady but the worst aspect was his claim that "until trust was established" he wanted 40 articles up front before making payment. Hello?? I'm the one with all the risk doing the writing, if anything he should be paying on a per article basis until I can trust him with a big wad of 40 articles, only to then HOPE he's actually gonna pay and not walk on looking for his next freebie batch off of someone else. So I turned him down. But it just makes me all the more see a lot of these low-level, antiquated SEO shiesters for what they are. I run my own blog and made the decision to simply have massive amounts of new, original content and let Google sort it all out. My readership climbs higher every month.

I understand that you want to make a point with maximum of Passion and integrity, but honestly it's a bit annoying.

As a digital marketer, I recommend using article spinning services only in case of a writer's block (we all know it happens, and to keep up a good blog you need to update your content constantly). But always, only use some old content that you created and spend some time to make it readable (cz article spinners are machines and they generate non-sense most of the time).

I'll admit I looked in to article spinning and submission tools and so on but it seemed like far too much effort for such minor gains when I could spend the time writing a quality article, publishing it once and getting number 1 results through great content and naturally aquired links. Takes far less time than messing about with spinning software.

Great WBF. What annoys me the most is that even if you keep as far away from article marketing as you can possibly get, it's still going to have a negative effect from people taking your content and spinning it for their site. It drives me absolutely crazy!

I appreciate the authenticity and I can tell this really matters to Rand.

However, the truth is the system right now is built this way. Despite Panda updates and so forth... it will take at least a few years for Google to catch up and fully evolve to a state of higher quality.

Until then, this type of linkbuilding does work when mixed with higher quality link building tactics and if you're building niche sites and such... it does work.

There are so many different discussions here it is hard to make sense of everything...

What about this scenerio?

You create a quality article, that is highly shareable. You run it through a spinner, and then manually go through each and every spin, and make changes for optimal readability.

You then sydicate it to the blog network (not article directories and all the other content farms).

From this, perhaps you will get 20 blogs who feel your content is valuable enough to post. Would this be a positive form of using article spinning?

I fully agree that you shouldn't automate spinning, and you shouldn't have your content used on poor sites. However, the above solution doesn't raise any red flags in my mind. In my mind, it is compreble to a Press Release being published 20 times on different, industry relevent websites. This is seen as positive, why not doing it with an article (except the article will have a much higher % of unique content).

Great article! I had just been discussing this with one
of our SEO's partners. I've asked they focus on effective and quality
techniques such as on-page Optimization (including the use of Rich snippets,
etc), quality press releases, video optimization, Slideshare and social media.
I do believe that quality articles still have a place but the key is quality
not the kind of horrible article writing I've read and is referred to in this
article.

Wow, This was really a peice of advice that I needed in this time of crisis.

I am a blogger & I always focussed on writing quality articles out of my own experience. I was stuck at some level of traffic I can not getting more than that from almost a year. Then I thought I never focussed on link building separately and I should do it now (After writing 600+ articles on my blog)

I found article marketing, commenting without even I want or not or or using some tools to submit so many things - I amw asting my time in all of it & I am not sharing good value on web.

I guess, I should focus on getting attention of more readers, or attract some new users to my blog than focussing on these whatever hat SEO techniques !

Over the years we have worked with a number of SEO firms who look after getting our website ranked. Unfortunatley this as I am now understanding has been one of the activities in all these firms, and the firms we use are well known firms (not backyarders) who have their ceo etc speaking at well regarded conferences and used by supposedly large firune 500 companies. So as a student and employer of SEO firms I am both angry and frustrated because we thought we were doing only white hat activities and we have been clear to avoid black hat activities.

Rand can I ask that something could be done to actually review and screen seo firms. Maybe they can get an SEOMOZ stamp of approval (like TRUSTE or VERISIGN logo) that an approved, accredited and ethical white hat seo firm. They are reviewed once a year and they are subject to a strict code - I will leave it to you to work out the details.

What this will do is allow me and other employers to know if I can trust an seo firm. At the moment we struggle to find a quality seo firm and unfortunatley the Google accredited logo seems to be used quite broadly (not sure if its use is checked) and therefore cannot be a trusted source.

If A client doesn't have a budget to do effective seo, I tell them to go do PPC. We don't click a pen for anything under $3500/month. We don't outsource as we believe in hiring local talent and training. We do "article marketing" for all our clients and see great results. The difference is we rarely ever do guest posts and we never spin our articles.

We write fresh articles and try to balance between keyword plugging and engaging topics. We've seen awesome results for everyone who puts the time in. It's worked for local and national branding campaings. I think this clearly falls into the "not scammy" category as, quite franky, it's not scammy! I think Rand was trying to prove a point so hard with focus in the spammy direction that he didn't really focus on how ethical content writing actually works.

Had several LOL moments. I think this is the most passionate I've ever seen Rand, and I loved it. And it's good too. For whatever reason ... successes of the past ... it's easy to be wooed by this crap form of SEO. No, I can't call it SEO anymore. I'm trying to change my language. This crap form of spam. Thanks Rand yet again for the push and motivation to create real, authentic, great content for the web. It's the only long term SEO strategy that makes any sense.

Found this again while dealing with a client's problems caused by the recent demise of a large article marketing network after Google deindexed them. (Links bought by another agency, not me)

Suprised there aren't any followup posts but maybe it's now too old. I agree with Rand's rant and will be posting my own take on it shortly on my own blog. Just interested to hear what all the folk who took the "it works so keep doing it" stance are thinking now. Cos personally I don't think Google have finished with the clear out, and I'll be delighted if more of the endless networks of crap content get hit.

There are a lot of well known affiliate marketing "gurus" who hawk their products with overblown squeeze pages that would probably like to put out a hit on Rand. That said, the message was very heartwarming.

Unfortunately, it was not pocket warming. A guy gotta eat and pay rent. My old sites with a decade of content rank well nowadays and seem immune to Pandas, Grizzleys, Lion, etc.

However, if you want to dip your toe into the affiliate marketing pool, you do not want to wait a year or two (or more) for your green hat techniques to take hold. The world will have moved on by then. So, you build a fast WP site and use the tactics you learned in the $77 dollar linking course you bought. Or you fire up the article spinner and take the trash articles you bought from someone who cannot string two good sentences together and blast them out to blogs far and wide. Maybe you make money for a year and then Google bot, which by then will have taken over all computers and control the world, burns your site to the ground. Oh well, build another, they're disposable.

The Panda update and articles like this push me back into marketing products and services that have a longer life. But, I can afford to plant a tree and wait for the fruit. This is a luxury for many (most) and unacceptable to clients.

A very good article I would say. Obviously spinning articles does not work as much as it worked a year ago, but recently I tend to see a lot of postings about what we should not do, and less postings about how can we get valuable links. My customers do not want to go with a strategy that sounds like "make your site more interesting and people will start linking to you". I need to get links from somewhere. And yes, SEOMoz has a great link acquisition assistant, but what else?

Rand, I love you! Great video and just what I was looking for as we are about to embark on what I think, will be a costly and unnecessary SEO campaign - as we launch a brand new website.

I've done all the SEO up until now, by reading, reading and reading, what all you good folks have to say. I've implemented as much as I have been able but some was beyond my ability but I have always been of the opinion that a lot of paid SEO is smoke and mirrors.

The company we are about to employ (not if it's up to me - a very expensive experiment to see what they can do for us) mentioned:

The majority of SEO work undertaken is offsite and this includes (not exhaustive lists);web2.0 & hub site creation3rd party content writing and submissiondirectory submissionsblog and forum postssocial bookmarkingDirect link buildingIndirect link building

as their SEO techniques and apart from me doing most of this myself in an ethical (if slow) way, I got very nervous when link building, 3rd party content writing and directory submissions was mentioned - because of everything written on SEO in the last 12 months at least!

Hi, I really liked your video. We fell for that with one of our sites www.cheapdealhotels.com and had an agency submit it to many directories. They also wrote crappy articles. At the end it hurt us and we immediately pulled the plug. However we are still struggling today with the "legacy" of that initiative and therefore had to open a new site at www.xhotels.net to start all over. Could have saved us a lot of money to listen to you a few years back!

I love this! This is what I have always felt. REAL content is king. Spun content is trash. However, it will turn into a back and forth war with the Google bots on one side and the article spinners on the other, both constantly trying to beat the other at the game. I know who will win this game and who will lose. Why do people insist on believing that machines will never be able to talk or in this case write like humans? Of course they will. Maybe not tomorrow or next year or maybe not even five years from now but what about 20 years? or 100 years? I know for a fact that machines WILL write material indistinguishable from what a human can write. Why? Because we are now doing the research and testing. Because it is humans programming the computers that write. Because we have the desire and with the advent of the Internet, we have the need. This is what scares me . . . because I am a writer.

We did the lower end of article marketing, the articles were all unique and averagely written, not total spammy, those we pruned away. Some of the first articles were also of higher quality written by me.

We did this for several months, total cost maybe 300$ and we gained VERY large amounts of backlinks, not root domain, but backlinks never the less, and this all helped us to get highly ranked on our niche.

Maybe we just did get lucky we got a guy with well above average quality in his service to do this, he did it as a individual and was very popular.

Catching up on my Whiteboard Fridays today. Thanks for the laugh, I needed it: "This is cleeeearly going to be great for my SEO!" "NO! NO No no no no no!" Oh, and as always for the great videos. Keep them coming.

I've got a great article written about topic x. Does trying to promote my "awesome article" which is available only on one site using variuous mediums like, twitter, facebook, Google+ or e-mail qualify as spammy article marketing? If so how should you plan to promote a more targeted blog post?

As far as my opinion i feel article marketing got no more attention from webmasters as they prefer to put original content in there blog instead of submitting to 100's of article directories as it is considered as spam. Better to stick with one article and promote the same in Stumbleupon, digg, twitter etc

Ha! Rands facial expressions are priceless in this video. Let's build relationships and not links and all will be right in the organic world http://downtownecommerce.com/blog/search-engine-marketing/12-things-to-check-before-sending-out-a-link-request-email

I tried article marketing when I was new to SEO - and it worked for a while. Then I started spinning, and that worked for a while. Then I was looking back at the places my spun article had been added, and I was thinking, "this looks like total crap. I can think of about 30 way Google could write an algorithm to break this down." I stopped, and my rankings were stable.

I then got involved with the community, and began getting to know people. I'd write these awesome posts, and sometimes it was discouraging because no one would read them. I kept promoting it, and getting to know people. Over time, I got a few articles that got some buzz. I got traffic from my links, and these people actually read my stuff! It was harder, but so much more effective.

And that's the story of how I got out of spammy SEO before Google brought down hammer #1. I really see more hammers coming in the future, because even I can think of way more ways to fight this kind of article spam - and I'm pretty sure Google's team is smarter than I am.

P.S. I chose the panda avatar because it resonates with what I feel will be the future of SEO.

Seriously, a great post and one that I've had experience with. Not done it myself but rather seen sites ranking really well in a short period of time having had loads of article spinning done for them. On-page seo was terrible but ranking really well....until Panda....now the sites are deep in the bowels of the serps!

Great sarcastic wb Friday Rand (loving it), this will create a lot of debate. The problem here is that the technique (article spinning) is working so why will the people using these techniques stop now? Obviously they won't stop till it stops working.

I have used article spinning tools before it surely works but the important thing is that you have to utilize other link building techniques to make that link profile as natural as possible and as powerful as possible that is what helps you hold that top position!

Rand I agree, you see soo many websites out in the market with low quality content.I think the thing is that soo many article spinners have been pumping out content by dodgy SEO companies will continue to use the software as it works for them.

I think the problem is with soo many companies out in the market "claiming" that article spinning is the new type of SEO secret that will instantly boost your SEO it is complete bull shit, it has been around for years and year and it is really scammy but people keep buying this stuff by classy sales pitches these guys put out.

But in the end of the day the key thing to remember is that tiop quality websites will only accept quality content if you want to be on great websites which are good authority you need good quality content. Sure enough you can get onto 200 crappy article websites but it will not do much in the long term if they are full of non unique poor content.

I agree that article marketing is a waste of time (now) but I think it's more Panda that has made this change than anything else. I mean, article spinning and marketing was a common not exactly black hat technique a few months ago. Recommended and pursued by many.

What should you do with articles already floating around on the web? Take them down? Let them sit around and be useless?

I was thinking about this and You are right, but what about if I work in a smaller country?

I tried to create nice blog posts but did not work. In my ecommerce webdesign market in hungary I have not so much traffic :-( If I make simeting very unique nad useful (I did a lot of webinars, ebooks...) but I don't have enough people to search for or read them?

I'm sure your aware of this but one imparticualar company, who heavily supported one of your moz confernces, uses this article spinning model and employs many "SEO Specialists" to spin articles all day long. That was a big deterrent for me to even apply to that company for employment. I don't want to throw anyone under the bus so I won't mention their name.

A great video - as an agency we have to do a lot to combat misconceptions and try to help clients see the value in other types of link building that actually takes budget and effort.

That said, I really do believe at this point that some spammy tactics are going to work (to some degree) forever. Not necessarily article marketing - we saw great movements towards improving this problem with the Panda Update(s). But things like reciprocal link exchanges have potency because while Google can understand a great deal about where a link is and what it says, how you actually GOT it is much more difficult to decipher - sometimes you need human intervention to bust a link ring, detect shady practices, and so on. Algorithms are ever-improving, but I think in some ways there will always be some loophole to exploit.

The other interesting caveat is that if what everyone is saying is true about future penalization, etc. - then technically we could tank our competitors NOW by helping them in the short term and spinning some articles on their behalf. Granted, perhaps the worst that could happen is just the links being devalued.

It's a complex issue and I appreciate SEOMoz's neverending advocacy of white hat SEO. I do believe long term these types of campaigns will be more sustainable and less likely to get swatted down by algo updates. But sadly enough, getting buy in from clients for this type of work has been made much more difficult by the tarnished image the SEO world has seemed to inflict upon itself.

"We don't want you to spend 5 hours identifying potential guest blogging opportunities - just submit 2,000 links for us". Cue the client education - and on it goes. The onus is on those playing by the rules to educate clients why it matters to do so - often with compelling evidence AGAINST playing by the rules. Not complaining - just stating a fact.

I like to think of SEO as a war, and the fact is - as Rand said himself - sometimes the wrong people win. The rest of us sit in limbo hoping Google will eventually ride in to save the day with their giant spam vaccuum.

Thanks Rand, I am really impressed with your words and I request you to present a special edition of WBF on "something real which is authentic to search engines " What we need to do really authenticated to get qaulity link rather than article marketing, press releases, blog commenting, reciprocal link building etc.

Though I do agree on the sustainable vision of yours, banning article marketing presents me with a few dilemma's, which I haven't figured out yet.

1. What about writing a good article, link to a good relevant page and submit? Isn't marketing all about exposure? Dropping your advertising all over the place to get customers (or attention at the very least)? I know. there some bad real life places like red light areas you don't want your leaflet to show up if you're not in that business, but hey, the bulletin board at a supermarket isn't such a bad place?

2. What about press releases? You need those once in a while for the same reasons as mentioned in 1.

Guest blogging, guest authoring, op-ed contributions, etc. are all great in my book, but no one calls those "article marketing" anymore. In our field, that term has become pretty uniquely associated with the spammy practice I'm describing in the video.

Press releases don't fall into this, either, but I'd strongly urge you not to do press releases with a focus on getting good SEO'd links when you post it. Instead, think first and foremost about how to attract the attention and interest of a real journalist - someone who reads press release headlines, browses the content, then decides whether to publish it. If you get a press release posted to the same 20 sites as every other release, you're likely adding close to 0 value. If, however, real reporters and sources actually re-publish your release or, even better, write an article about your company/product/release/news, then you've won. That should be the goal of press releases, IMO.

The thing is, Google can't really tell if an article is a load of rubbish or if it is really interesting. You can write dozens of emails to blogs trying to get a guest entry, and so many will just ignore you that it's really disheartening even if the emails are totally personalised.

Article websites will accept crap, quickly too. At the moment, it feels like a waste of effort sometimes trying to write quality content because people won't let you do it on their websites. I do both really. My articles are certainly not spun and published thousands of times automatically, but I will write them pretty quickly without a massive amount of thought.

I am too against the article spinners and then submting them too hundreds of article directories that doesn't even have moderation. After Panda hit most of the greatest article websites like Ezine have also been down which shows that Google is too much intellgent about content and all that stuff. The best option is to go with Guest Posts and Blog Publishing on some authortative websites. Thanks again but you forget to mention about Something Real, hope will cover it in next whiteboard firday. :)

My first SEO job was at a content farm. My co-workers, all trained journalists (some with degrees from Harvard and six years of experience managing actual newspapers) reviled what we did. Once I moved on to another job that allowed full creative control, I began producing 100% original content, sans the slime. And thanks to social media and PR distribution, I don’t need no stanking bots or directories.

I think that if you produce unique content and distribute it over many quality article directories you will definitely improve your rankings. Blog commenting (unless in some particular discussion) and the directory submission are something everyone should avoid.

I totally agree with you Rand - if you spin content and produce crap, you are not likely to maintain any good rankings in long term. However, the truth is that probably most of the "SEO experts" still use it and they will continue to unless Google does something about it.

Since we are also doing SEO, for a conclusion I would like to say that if you are trying to produce a lot of spinned content, blog comments or directory submissions, you are likely to spend more time than it takes to produce a couple of well written, informative and most importantly unique articles. Furthermore, the links you will get from them are more likely to help you boost your rankings and also they are cheaper (for most of the spinners you will have to pay as mentioned above 300$ and you can buy quality articles for like 20$ per piece), so it is definitely not worth doing it.

Sadly, it will take a lot of time until this practice completely dissappears

I'm with you on this one, Rand. Remember when Eric Schmidt, ex-CEO of Google, called the web a "cesspool"? It was a harsh comment but with the amount of MFA sites and content-spinning going on he made a valid point; Hard-working copy writers and content managers were being trumped in the SERPs by non-writers using cheap software or cheap labour.

I hope the message from this WBF goes far and wide, Rand, that the quality will ultimately prevail and not the quantity. As for the small businesses, they need to be continually and increadingly made aware of best practice and quality SEO and content needs to be available to them too.

Awesome - two thumbs up! Everyone who thinks they can game the system indefinitely should educate themselves about how Google works. I'm reading "In the Plex" and it's a great insight/reminder to how they think and approach search.

thanks rand, there you shown us the difference between quality and junk content . .yes new web marketing trend comes to tell us to work on something real .. like Publish on Ehow.com , business.com , some are big something new on the site where there is enough amount traffic and authority . .

Would need to use just links from article sites to truly test their ranking effect, for all my client sites have also used in conjunction with a number of other link sources such as directories, bookmarks, web 2.0, forums, blogs and social networks, so hard to guague the effect of the article links themselves.

I don't think I've ever seen you that wound up in a WBF, Rand. It's tough to see people out there using these tactics and having them actually work. It just reinforces the wrong mindset. Great passion and hilarious examples!

Question for Rand. Are you saying that Article Marketing is a black hat strategy altogether or are you addressing the black hat ways of doing Article marketing? I am new to SEO as a profession and would like to get some clarity on this. Thank you.

Hmm... Rand - so what about promoting great, awesome content using these methods? Because I mostly agree with your points here, however the world is not that black and white. Online reality isn't only about great websites which fight their way through using white-hat methods and scammers who get a smooth ride to the top doing black-hat for their junk.

The main division I see between white-hat and grey/black-hat is where the point of control over link building is placed. With grey/black-hat methods all links are a direct result of the work of a person doing SEO. You sit down, click a few times, look for interesting sites, submit content etc. and you get links. You might not have 100% success rate, but still you are SURE that you will get a substantial amount of links.

Now white-hat is a bit more tricky, because most of the time it's basically a mix of PR and advertising taken online. Using communication tools to influence, persuade people to share the content, link back to it etc. In the long-term this practically means brand building, because once you have a brand and grow it you're less vulnerable to volatility in the white-hat results. Of course, there are techniques which give you more control, but the bottom line is that the exposure comes naturally.

When you think about the uncertainty it's certainly no surprise that people prefer to go for something less "awegasmic" but a lot easier to control. So, going back to my initial point - how unethical is it to promote a brilliant, awesome new product using such short-cuts? I have no bad intentions, I honestly think my offer is going to change the world, or at least make the lives of a few people nicer. I invested in a great site, design, user interface etc. and now I have to choose - either I will try to make it rank well using purely clean methods or decide to take a quick, cheaper and more predictable ride on article directory submissions. I don't even mean spinning - let's say all of the content is also pretty good, unique etc.

How bad is that?

And after I got my quick results I might decide to now support it with white-hat methods, social media engagement etc. Links are diversified, I got my rankings quickly and now am I able not only to sell my product but build a lot of legitimate, good engagement from my customers.

When I do content marketing - notice not article marketing :) - I divide content into 3 main types - news/commentary/instructional and create content that I find interesting. Good content takes a bit of a road map - like setting up Google Alerts for news on topics, whiteboarding topics for article subjects, bullet pointing the points of each subject, and writing a final version. If you have published a Youmoz on here, then the time you took to write that Youmoz post is about the time you should take on creating valuable content if the intent is to get links and attract readers. Once the content is created, it is published to clients website, then pushed to social media and bookmarking services.

I have syndicated good articles to article type directories and websites - and some have been picked up by other blogs and websites generating additional backlinks, but their effectiveness over time has been reduced significantly since some of the article sites and directories have lost trust and authority, and indexation rates. If your articles don't get indexed on a website, what is the point of sending it there? There are still some sources worth using, but not many. The effort as Rand mentioned is better suited in going after real interaction.

I recently hosted a small workshop for a business association in Atlanta, and one of the things I pointed out was that Google trys to imitate real life - what is relevant in real life should be relevant online. You can spend time leveraging real relationships for link building (and get some GREAT links) or invest time in the "scummiest, lowdownest, dirtiest, ugliest, messiest, nastiest, no goodnesst things of all in the SEO world" by spinning "unique" content.

Hello all my first post on the SEOMOZ and i am very exicited.I just love the concept discussed in video, Really being noble always a right choice. Rand you are all perfect with the points and I will recommend these article to all those persons who just thinks that increaseing a numbers of backlinks can helps them to boost up their Keyword rankings. I don't know why many peoples who are new or out of the industry have a mentality that posting maximum links helps them to gain maximum visibility. I had seen many peoples who are just asking for links from there SEO agencies it always been tough to explain that thousands of article posting will kill your site and business reputation. Many webmasters strongly belive that having a top 10 ranking will make there business a bit hit. But I just want to say them that Top 10 ranking is destination where you will only reach if you promote your self in a right manner to the path of popularity otherwise you also been added to into list of million lossers.

A big part of the problem is SEO agencies going out with this stuff as part of their services package. I.E. something like "3 articles a week submited to PRWire..." In some ways this ligitimizes the practice because during an RFP for SEO serivces three out of four companies offer article factories, the fourth looks like they don't provide anything.

The worst (and also maybe the most interesting) part of SEO as a service is that there is no standard package. Every sitatuation calls for a customized approach.

Your passion for this issue makes this the best WBF I've ever seen. Bravo, Rand, for calling bullsh*t on something when you see it. High-quality, original content is still a huge part of any good SEO campaign, but the delivery means you discuss in this video are annoying at best and damaging to the SEO community at worst.Also, it's always a good sign when a presenter is so passionate about a topic that he can't even spell "something" right :)

WBF with emotion is what I like to see! You obviously share the same hatred for shady article marketing practices that I do. I FULLY understand what you were trying to convey with this Whiteboard Friday, and I appreciate and respect the fact that you publically addressed it with such emotion.

Bottom line in my opinion:

Write articles that you yourself would enjoy reading.

Create compelling and original content with a unique tone that people WANT to share.

Don't tarnish your brand's reputation by whoring out articles that are garbage.

The quality of the content that you are spreading is a direct reflection of your brand.

I'm involved in very competitive industries (Golf Packages, Vacation Rentals & Real Estate), and I monitor my competitor's SEO efforts like a hawk. Everyday I see different examples of shady article marketing. What's even more disheartening is the fact that I see it paying off for a few of them.

With that said, seeing this kind of behavior being rewarded with short-term ranking increases doesn't motivate me to emulate.

THANK YOU again for speaking about this topic with such conviction, it inspires me to continue doing the right things for my company.

I write real, authentic and hopefully useful content for the web within my niche. Those articles and tips are published on my website, but I also have a service that sends a copy of my article out to a number of article directory sites (only high quality sites that list authentic and good quality content). I don't see how this is wrong. I like to share. I put links to my articles on FB, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg and Stumbleupon. Just trying to get the word out about my website and the quality content I add to it 5 days a week. What is wrong with reposting my content (not spammy stuff) on to quality article directories?

As is true in most walks of life, the right way to do things is not necessarily the easiest, and most often the more difficult way to do things. I won't go so far as to label spammy article marketing as immoral (maybe), but I can hardly believe that it's in any way fulfilling. The monetary benefits of any profession are best enjoyed by those who've worked honestly and diligently to not only earn those profits, but seek also to shed positive light on their field of work and the world around them. Does regurgitation through article spinning represent the SEO field rightly? I'll let you be the judge.

Remember, the easiest path is often well-traveled. That doesn't make it the best path. When it comes to competing for local business, there are certainly marketing and (coinciding) moral decisions to be made. Most often, if you have to abandon morality to reach your goals, you won't feel like you've truly accomplished what you set out to do. Just as a terrible car ride can ruin any family vacation to Florida, flooding spun articles to directories as a means of link-building can jeopardize the fulfillment of your targeted position.

Who am I kidding, though? As long as the money's rolling in and your clients are high with ecstacy, all is well. Let the drug dealers among us prosper.

wow Rand, you're really pumped here :) Not that I don't understand, I fully support your angle and agree. I recently posted a sort of angry anti article marketing post and some of the comments I got were for article marketing and how it still works... Unfortunatelly I'm sure that some of these guys had some success with article marketing but they tend to be hard to convince otherwise, which is quite annoying! How to explain to these guys that the results they see are temporary at the best...

Also, loved the alternatives these guys offer, really high quality, for stone age :)

I beg to differ on commenting. I did a Youmoz post a while back on a piece of linkbait that we did (sports related) and one of the best pieces of marketing we did was blog commenting. We found football related blogs talking about players featured in the quiz tool we made and we got a lot of direct traffic, I'm sure a few referred links, and a few more people added the badges. So while it may not have a direct impact on SEO, smart commenting can be a great indirect way to get links.

I feel so sorry for those out there complaining about this post and for your customers if you really are relying on GARBAGE tools like BOOK MARKING DEMON and the like to spin garbage on the web.

I own that software by the way. I try to buy them all to see what they are doing. I also own one of these article directory type websites. I wish folks wouldn't publish with this intent. I have had to work with the adsense team and slow the site down with spam removal tools to keep the ball rolling. I also delete entire accounts as soon as I see dup content. That is another risk you have if your publishing your crap on these websites. Here today, gone tomorrow.

I believe this article hit home for many whether they admit it or not. I admit it. I have chopped up a few articles for my personal projects or for tests in my day but I would never do it professionally or make it an active strategy. One "JC Penny" incident or "Overstock" debacle could ruin your career or push you into an industry you won't be proud to be in.

On the positive-

Publishing original content to these places can be beneficial to some small degree. I will say that you are likely to get a crawl sooner from this practice. You may also get some traffic but not a lot of convertable traffic. I doubt many people love reading the 300 word chops on ehow articles or articlebase.

Anyone willing to share there ezinearticle conversion rates? How about goarticles?

If your big there and not in the diet or vices categoriies I'd lke to know if that's the vehicle growing your brand?

Also, if your at the agency level and know of a company using this unprofessional practice you should use this as an opportunity to omit or no longer extend to them a professional courteosy and start calling their clients today. Their intenional negelegence and failure to follow an industry best practice has opened them up to this not to mention the risk they have tied their clients to.

To be honest I don't buy into this "I have 300$ only and I want to rank". Sorry, life is hard - if you don't have money you don't get the results. I actually come from a design background, used to work for a couple of years for an ad agency and a lot more as a freelancer - and this is the kind of approach designers experience everywhere.

Trying to preach and teach never helps, the clients always know better. I mean - seriously - you're running a business and you can't afford 500$ a month to do SEO? What kind of business are you running then? If you don't have that kind of money it will usually mean that your website sucks as well because you were "on a budget" and wouldn't pay for a good designer. And if your site sucks then it is more likely than not that even tons of traffic will simply bounce off it and not really follow with any real action. So what's the point of doing that anyway?

If you're doing this without proper analysis then you're not a businessman and you will be stuck with your small, barely surviving company forever. Either you want to know how much you need to invest to get results or don't do it at all.

Many business owners then get discouraged because they "tried internet but it doesn't work" for them. But it's not the problem of the internet but of making it work. Problem is - business owners very often don't even want to listen. They heard something from a friend of a friend and want you to do it - and pay you peanuts because "it's easy". Honestly - go on Elance and try to find reasonable SEO offers :) I find 1 out of 10 on average is decent enough to put in some effort to prepare a good bid.

Web is a market - a very competitive one - and if you don't have the means to compete there then focus on other channels rather than waste your money here.

I disagree. You don't need anything fancy to rank. For as little as $45 a month on a blog subscription/hosting you can get involved with the kind of blog architecture that helps get you ranked quickly.

Also, you really need to have the ability to find keywords that are rankable, and a blog that you don't have to waste 80+ hours setting up. I'm not going to link push here, but Market Samurai has some decent tools for the KW part, and I use a blog network (Level One) which helps rapidly rank keywords which aren't already too competitive.

I'm still shocked at how many people still forget things like KW in the ulr and title...so simple, but overlooked because ppl want to get fancy, or were never taught the right keyword placement, and phrase density when building content for google ranks.

Google is a computer algorithm, nothing more, if it can't scan the important areas of your content, and identify it for being associated with a particular KW, then you're never going to get indexed...

Believe it or not, there is a sweet spot for ranking on google when you build your content...